“Sofie Hansen up to her old exploitative tricks again.” That was the Instagram comment that finally released the thread I should have been able to unpick myself. Sometimes Google Translate added another layer of harshness to the Danish language, which was already quite blunt. But this didn’t seem to be a thoughtless comment, hastily typed. Sofie had done this all before.
When I met the team’s psychologist, Victoria—who also happened to be Sofie’s friend from university—she had explained that every fortnight, the team meeting would take the form of a sharing circle “because we take mental health very seriously here”.
“I don’t have anything to share in the intervention today,” said Jakob, the lanky IT guy with perfectly coiffed blonde hair.
“No, Jakob, it’s not called that anymore,” said Victoria sternly, “Remember, they’re sharing circles now. You can share whatever you like, but we all have to share something.”
“I read in my new favourite book,” said Sofie, “which you all really must read, that our bodies store tension which will make us sick if we don’t release it. It’s, like, really unhealthy to keep all that tension locked up inside.” Her many bracelets jangled as she squeezed Jakob’s arm.
“That doesn’t sound productive,” he replied.
“Well, it’s what the book says.”
“Well, that’s not something I’m comfortable with.”
“Maybe we could talk about your Instagram post, Sofie,” Rina cut in. “You still haven’t said anything about it.”
“That’s actually a personal attack,” Sofie responded, pulling her own long, bleached locks into a tight topknot. “I’m practising not responding to those.”
“Actually, that was a perfectly non-violent sentence,” said Victoria.
Sofie gave her friend a cutting look. “I just can’t deal with the haters,” she said, beginning to sob. “I know I’m the founder, and I’m grateful, truly I am. But while I’m busy flying around the world fundraising, you guys get to do the community work, the real work. I don’t think you understand how hard that is on me, watching you guys do all the fun stuff.”
“Great share, Sofie. But you haven’t responded to Rina. Perhaps we can come back to your share shortly.”
“Why is it that every time I bring up my feelings, someone else’s always get prioritised?” asked Sofie, snorting into her hands. “If someone had told me being a start-up founder would be this exhausting … I don’t think I can take it anymore.”
By the time I started working for Digital Natives in Copenhagen, they were in the process of beefing up their team of three, having received one of Google’s Tech for Social Good grants earlier that year. The organisation’s mission was to connect Indigenous women online in order to “foster knowledge sharing and solidarity across borders”. Both Sofie and Google seemed to have skipped over the fact that great swathes of the world’s Indigenous women didn’t have access to the internet.
When I arrived, the team was still figuring out how to reach the Indigenous women who were active online. Finding these women on social media was going to be part of my job as the Native English editorial intern. As a Māori whose mother tongue was English, I was Native two times over.
My job consisted of maintaining the organisation’s blog and social media, that is to say, recycling news about Indigenous peoples from other websites and publishing it on Digital Natives’ own sites. As the only Native English speaker, it was also my job to proofread documents like funding proposals, but I quickly began to notice that even after I’d corrected my colleagues’ spelling mistakes, new errors would appear in the final published documents. I was still mulling over how to broach this subject with Sofie.
My entry into Denmark had foreshadowed my entire stay. I’d failed to operate the push-activated luggage trolley handles coming through Copenhagen Airport’s arrivals gate and ended up with a queue of silent but obviously impatient Danes backed up behind me as I ploughed my way through the crowd of welcomers, all waving tiny Danish flags. Ever since, I’d had the feeling I was doing it all wrong, surrounded by invariably hot people who barely tolerated me for not complying with their superior ways.
Three weeks into my stay, Digital Natives hosted its first community event. When I re-read the Facebook event description I’d written, it sounded like exactly the kind of event where it would be appropriate to wear the raukura I’d wrapped in a tissue and tucked carefully into my makeup bag before I left Pōneke. Now on the other side of the world, something in my gut told me to leave the feathers in my purse.
Even though I’d written the invitation, it had been hard for me to get a clear picture of who we might expect to show up to the event, and, looking around the room, the guests seemed a little surprised to be there themselves.
No one could say it wasn’t a diverse group of guests: two Danish academics from Copenhagen University’s anthropology department and two young Senegalese guys whom Sofie and Victoria spent most of the time talking to in even higher-pitched voices than usual. Sofie had met the guys that morning at a metro station and invited them back for the event. “It’s so weird, like, I don’t normally even take the metro, so it must have been fate! I don’t know their colonial stories, but, I mean, all of Africa was colonised, right? So I guess we’ll find out!”
Those of us paid to be there made up exactly half of the people in attendance.
Shortly after I started my job, Sofie asked me to speak Māori for her.
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to buy some time so I could work out my strategy.
“Like, I don’t know, say anything. I just want to hear how it sounds.”
“Well, we didn’t speak Māori at home when I was growing up,” I explained, “so I know some basic phrases, but that’s about it.”
She looked confused but quickly adjusted her face, clearly wanting to appear to understand. I did my best to explain the intergenerational impact of colonisation and our people’s slow but steady work on language revitalisation, but pretty soon, it felt like I’d been talking for too long, so I stopped.
“I’ve been learning Quechua for my trip to Peru!” she exclaimed. “It’s kind of like Spanish, but prettier.”
In the three weeks I’d worked there, I hadn’t learned much about online community management, as had been advertised, but I’d learned plenty about which organisations and activists did and did not “get it”.
A non-exhaustive list of entities that Digital Natives employees denounced: Mövenpick ice cream (Nazi connections), Al Jazeera (“not as woke as it sounds”) and “white people food”, except for New Nordic; that was fine. Amnesty International was “outdated”, and the UN was “a bitch”, but those two letters still spoke volumes to donors. That was why Kristian, Sofie’s boyfriend who was often in the office for hours at a time but apparently had another job elsewhere, had bought tickets for the two of them to attend a UN conference on Indigenous climate action in New York.
“So, I guess you must have quite a bit to do with Greenland House?” I’d asked Sofie in my Skype interview, hoping to show I’d done my research.
“Sorry, what?”
“Oh, I saw that their office is just around the corner from yours—it’s the cultural centre for Greenlandic people in Copenhagen?” I’d unnecessarily made the last part into a question, revealing my very Kiwi need to please.
I could immediately see this was the wrong thing to say. Later I’d learn that Sofie found working in the centre of town deeply uncool, but Kristian had found the office space for a steal, and she couldn’t afford to say no—for once, a vintage bargain she wasn’t so keen to show off.
Naïvely expecting Greenland and its people to be at the centre of a Danish organisation working with Indigenous rights, I was surprised to find not a single Greenlandic person working at Digital Natives and very little discussion of Danish colonial history, let alone its ongoing impact.
I’d only just arrived, but I already seemed to know more than my Danish colleagues, not so much due to my own experience as an Indigenous person but more because I had been reading up on Wikipedia with the help of Google Translate.
When I mentioned to my teammates what I’d been reading about the separation of Greenlandic families by the Danish Red Cross in the 1950s, for example, I quickly realised that framing this research as if I was catching up was incorrect. If I was catching up, they weren’t even on the starting blocks. My new colleagues were interested in the Indigenous people living far away, not right here in Copenhagen where they might actually run into them.
More than once, information of this nature that I shared with teammates appeared just days later in their own personal, typo-ridden Facebook posts. At first, I saw this as evidence of their willingness to learn and my own professional impact. But over time, what had looked like learning began to feel more and more like theft.
It was a quote Sofie gave to the British newspaper The Guardian that had inspired me to apply for the internship. “Refugees get a lot of airtime these days,” she had said, “and it feels like Indigenous people are always getting left behind. I literally saw a documentary about land grabbing in Peru and immediately wrote the Instagram post to ask whether anyone else even cared. It went totally viral, and now here we are!”
I’d sent off my internship application the same night I’d found the story, thinking how clever it would be to have a job lined up in Copenhagen before I’d even arrived. Up until then, I’d been picturing myself working in a café or an English-language bookshop. Getting a job at Digital Natives would mean working on Indigenous kaupapa, even on my OE.
I’d selected Copenhagen as my destination right at the apex of mid-2010s Scandimania. Fixed-gear bikes filled Instagram feeds, while washed-out minimalist interior design could be found everywhere from Freedom Furniture to Kmart. Newspapers ran op-eds on hygge, and someone wrote a book on their “year of living Danishly”. Everyone seemed to agree: the Danes did it better. And they were hot, too. I imagined myself cycling along those flat cycle lanes from party to club, surrounded by stylish, virulent, casually gyrating blondes. And sometimes, my time in Copenhagen really did live up to that image. I was stoked to be invited to a Balkan Beats concert, where everyone in the team except me seemed to know all the words despite them being in Serbo-Croatian.
If it was so great to be Danish, I wondered as Jakob ripped off his t-shirt and leapt into the moshpit, why were they trying so hard to be something else?
“I’ve got a fun new challenge for you,” announced Sofie, perching her butt on my desk. I hadn’t yet broached the subject of tapu, lest it become fodder for another Facebook post. “How would you like to be in charge of a new intern? She’s coming from Greenland for her last year of high school and wants to get some work experience. Her name’s Rina—I think? Anyway, she’s new, like you. I think it’ll be great!”
Rina was new like me, but more importantly, she was Indigenous like me. Until I’d arrived, everyone in the team had been white, Danish, under 30 and university-educated, which only seemed to add to Digital Natives’ arduous media coverage. This was a fact I had somehow managed to miss until my second day of work. When counting them off on my fingers in the staff toilet, I realised I really had met the entire team. I was the only Indigenous staff member, and I easily passed for white myself.
On my first day, Sofie had slid off her bike seat to greet me with a hug, wearing a t-shirt with GIRLBOSS embroidered in sequins on the front. It had looked pretty fantastic with her vintage floral flares. I’d loved the idea of having a fun, feminist boss.
Sofie’s outfits often seemed hastily put together, not quite effortless, but a close cousin. When she wore the same GIRLBOSS outfit again on Rina’s first day, I realised she probably wasn’t getting dressed in as much of a hurry as she might have wanted us to think.
Meanwhile, getting hugged at work turned out to be a daily occurrence. When a staff member arrived at the office, they went around the room hugging everyone else, like hongi, but at work. They did the same thing when they left at the end of each day.
At first, it had seemed harmless to me, even sweet, given no one else in Copenhagen was likely to be hugging me any time soon. But then I took a weekend trip to Berlin, where I saw a photo of two Communist leaders kissing on the mouth. The museum’s caption explained that during the Cold War, leaders were under increasing pressure to perform this ritual as proof of their loyalty.
“Alright, ladies—oh, sorry. Hi, Jakob! Today we’ll be getting our yogi groove on to Rihanna’s epic new album. Because, I mean, obviously! Am I right?” Conveniently, Victoria was also the team’s yoga instructor.
I hoped the blaring beats would cover up at least some of Sofie’s panting this week, as it tended to grow more guttural as a session wore on. But even the deep buzzing synth of Desperado couldn’t drown her out. She seemed to compete with whatever Riri threw at us. Victoria eyeballed me as we scooped our hands up in a sun salutation, suppressing a giggle.
Officially, yoga was offered to all team members free of charge in recognition of the “emotionally taxing nature” of our work. I did find being at work emotionally taxing, but not for the reasons implied. Unofficially, anyone who skipped yoga was scolded for not prioritising self-care. There were also drinks every Friday, which everyone was expected to attend, and I’d heard mention of regular coke-fuelled “offsites” at Kristian’s summer house in Sweden. It would be another six years before a man in France would win his legal battle for the right not to be fun at work, a victory for normies the world over.
Back in the open-plan office where she seemed to be frequently changing her outfit, Sofie paused, topless except for a bra that still managed to reveal her nipples.
Jakob came through the door and immediately reversed back out.
“No, no, it’s fine Jakob,” shrieked Sofie. “We’re all family here. Come back!” Her arms were raised in an openly aggressive bid for his return. He followed the boss’s orders but, once in the room, went to face a corner and ogle the ceiling.
“I just got so much out of our session today,” Sofie’s monologue continued. “I think Rihanna really spoke to me. I just needed to let it all out and get loud, you know? How was yoga for you today, Denise?”
I said I’d found it quite hard to focus.
“Yeah, well, it takes practice. You’ll get there.”
She turned and headed for the bathroom, which was exactly where I was headed to change. She was only three steps ahead of me but had already nailed her pout in the mirror by the time I reached the mirror.
“Oh my God,” she screeched, “I had another sex dream about Jakob last night. They’ve been getting so much more intense and kinky since summer arrived.”
“Yeah, well, he definitely won’t catch on if you offer him another half-naked hug.”
“Oh, come on, Denise, we’re family. Jakob knows that.”
“We’re family, but you also want us to get naked together?”
“Oh my God, you are, like, suuuuuch an Anglo-Saxon conservative. It’s hilarious!”
That weekend, I arrived home from a club in the very short pocket of darkness that denotes a Danish summer. Reaching up to close my bedroom window blind, I was briefly dazzled by a fresh, bright light. It wasn’t the sun reappearing, as it did around 4.00 am on June mornings, but a backlit advertising panel inside the bus stop across the street. The panel creaked slightly as it scrolled to its next slide, and there was Sofie and her pout in a made-to-look-vintage ruffle dress and fresh Nike trainers, the word CHANGEMAKER stamped across her image. I guessed the tiny text at the bottom of the panel might say something vague and alluring about the work we did and how that related to footwear. Or maybe it didn’t even bother.
“I don’t think that would align with our values,“ Jakob had said as if anyone but Sofie ever had any say. “Nike is a nasty global corporation that relies on sweatshop labour.”
“But it would be such amazing exposure for our work!” countered Sofie.
“What work?” I didn’t say. I didn’t want to admit it, but I still didn’t know what my colleagues actually did with their work hours.
When Sofie invited me out for lunch the next week, I thought I’d finally get an opportunity to bring up the holes in our proofreading process. But it quickly turned into a one-sided vent.
“Kristian’s therapist says I’m manipulating him for money,” Sofie wept into her toast. Toast was, much to my bewilderment, the latest Danish foodie trend. “But that makes no sense because I’m an anti-capitalist. She doesn’t even know me!”
I put my frustrations about the errors she kept inserting into my work aside. Bonding with the boss was a good sign, I told myself.
I think Rina and I both knew it didn’t make sense for an intern to manage another intern. Still, I liked seeing her on the other side of our shared desk, an almost familiar sight among all the bright white newness. She, on the other hand, seemed to want nothing to do with me. Wise for a high schooler, it was as if she was determined to stave off the inevitable as long as she could: the common Indigenous experience of being lumped together with other minorities.
When I asked whether she wanted to bike to Sofie’s birthday party one weekend, she laughed and said she had better things to do, “like pluck out my eyelashes, one by one”. Her face told me this was not a mistranslation.
Of course, I went to the party, but I was the only person from work who showed up, except for Kristian, who didn’t really work there. This surprised me—I’d thought the team was a tight ball for me to penetrate, but I was the only one who’d made the effort.
When I got tipsy and confided in Sofie that I’d recently slept with a guy I met on the metro, she responded by telling me that she once slept with a guy on the metro.
“When the security guards saw us, they didn’t even tell us off; they just laughed and left us to it! We made it all the way to the airport, and then I got on my flight to Bali and never saw him again. Crazy times!”
Up until that point, I’d felt giddy that my Big OE now included at least one sexual experience, but now I felt almost pathetic next to my much more adventurous boss.
When Sofie described her party as “wild” during the team meeting the following week, I realised I was the only one who would know that wasn’t quite true. Train sex revelation aside, the party had been pretty quiet.
“Isn’t Sofie such a fun boss?” said Jakob, who wasn’t at her birthday party.
“It might just be that extreme Danish confidence that comes with growing up not wanting for anything,” said Sara, my new Australian friend.
“I think you’d better start looking for some new mahi,” said Mum on Skype. But I wanted to achieve something at Digital Natives first, I said. The idea still had so much potential.
“Well, Love, it’ll all come out in the wash.”
I’d been excited to have something to contribute to the team meeting. I’d found a hashtag gaining a lot of traction online and thought we could use #IndigenousInsta to get in touch with more Indigenous women. I wrote a blog post featuring some of my favourite contributions to the hashtag, many of them women on their ancestral lands in traditional dress, posing with pride.
That weekend, one finger scrolling while the other hand shovelled in some hangover eggs, I paused on a photo of Sofie pulling the peace sign, wearing a Sámi cloak. Prone to writing Instagram captions many paragraphs long, this time she’d simply used the hashtag. My body washed cold and then hot. I thought I was going to vomit, or cry, but then I stopped myself. Was Sofie actually Sámi, and I hadn’t realised?
No, she fucking wasn’t, Denise. That was the same blue and crimson gákti you saw in Copenhagen University’s anthropology department, the one the researcher had told you was for a male reindeer herder. It wasn’t hers. It wasn’t hers!
I thought about how I’d feel if the cloak had belonged to my tīpuna, wondered whether we’d ever owned taonga like that, felt the despair at not knowing. And here she was playing dress-up in some other whānau’s clothes.
With her stream-of-consciousness Instagram captions and chronic oversharing, Sofie seemed to have intuited that performing mental messiness was a direct route to authenticity, the coveted prize of our generation. Now she was levelling up and claiming Indigeneity, too.
She was a master of strategically inflating and deflating the narrative at selected vectors to make herself and her life appear more accidental and therefore fated. But the longer I worked for Sofie, the more I could see exactly where those inflation and deflation jobs took place, as stories began to loop and grow, or retreat and disappear. Working for her meant watching the cut-price sausage of self-mythology get made and tacitly agreeing to keep quiet about it.
It hurt to watch her try so hard. Or maybe the pain was just me wanting to be as comfortable in my own Indigenous identity as Sofie appeared to be in that photo, already sitting at 350 likes.
I wished her stupid photo would go viral so she could be called out. It didn’t, but the like count grew all afternoon as I lay on my bed refreshing and refreshing the post. And then there was that one righteous comment that confirmed everything I should have figured out months ago.
A simple Google—why hadn’t I Googled?!—revealed that Sofie had founded three previous social start-ups: one for refugees, one for impoverished children in Bali and another for single mothers, all with big ideas, glossy photos and no impact reports. All three projects’ Facebook pages had gone quiet over the past two years, without explanation.
I could see now she was here for herself alone. If using our images didn’t make her famous, she would spit us out and find some other group’s vulnerability to capitalise on.
In the following week’s sharing circle, once she’d stopped crying, Sofie came with all her keywords.
“My photo sends a strong signal of support to our Indigenous sisters.”
“It’s feminism. It’s, like, subversive.”
“It’s about starting a conversation.”
None of our team members bothered to argue with her.
My six months in Copenhagen had sharpened my edges and left me disillusioned about everything from aid organisations to global feminism and Scandimania. But if nothing else, being able to refer to Indigenous rights on my CV did help me secure a slightly above-entry-level job when I returned home. Much to my delight, no one at Te Puni Kōkiri had ever heard of Digital Natives.
I continued to follow Sofie online. Sometimes I would see that she had liked certain Instagram posts from a popular women’s lifestyle magazine. Whenever she liked something, I made a point of denouncing it, if only in my own mind.
Rina and I stayed in touch. In fact, we became much closer once we weren’t colleagues, even though we were now half a world apart. Digital Natives had brought a couple of Indigenous women together, after all.
Rina had chosen to continue working there while attending university, out of a conscientiousness I respected but couldn’t quite relate to.
“While they’ve got all that Google funding coming in, I may as well send some of it back to my family,” she’d explained during one of our Skype calls, throwing her pixelated hands up on the screen.
I enjoyed her tales of ongoing office dysfunction more than I thought I was probably supposed to. Recently, one of the Senegalese guys Sofie had met at the metro station and brought along to Digital Natives’ first event had been made Chief Technology Officer. He was in his second year of university.
“I guess he does have some kind of experience,” Rina winced. “I’m pretty sure they’re sleeping together!”
A white saviour commingling with the natives. If you didn’t think about it too hard, it almost sounded like it had never been done before.